Hospital guilty after a patient sexually assaults female patient. 

The risk was foreseeable.  

The Supreme Court of the ACT recently found a public hospital liable to a plaintiff who was sexually assaulted by a fellow patient who was under the influence of alcohol and had been behaving aggressively at the time of his admission to the plaintiff’s ward.

The plaintiff, a young female, was admitted to the hospital overnight. Subsequently, another patient, Mr Southwell, was admitted. Mr Southwell was intoxicated and behaving in an agitated manner.

Mr Southwell had a significant history of similar attendances at the hospital. During the night he proceeded to abuse and sexually assault the plaintiff. The plaintiff suffered significant post traumatic stress disorder as a result. 

The trial judge held at that the male patient was a “very foreseeable danger because of his history, his conduct on presentation at the hospital and his conduct after his admission and in particular in the ward…..should not have been in that ward and he should not have been so unsupervised that he was capable of freely molesting other patients“ 

The trial judge noted that there was “no evidence about the hospital’s funding, its capacity to provide extra nursing staff, its capacity to provide emergency warning systems and its ability to provide resources to prevent assaults by patients upon other patients. In addition, there was no evidence that (the male patient) could not have been placed in a bed in a different ward and there was no evidence that there was a shortage of beds available” 

The risk of a patient such as Mr Southwell causing harm to another patient was foreseeable and not insignificant. A hospital acting reasonably would have taken precautions to avoid the risk to the plaintiff, and judgment was awarded to the plaintiff in the sum of $267,662.83 plus the costs of her proceedings. 

A B v Australian Capital Territory  [2018] ACTSC 16